


Letters from the Underground

by maplemood



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Extra Treat, Forgiveness, Gen, Letters, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-08-18 21:30:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20198476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Boss has gotsomethingpumping the black, cold blood through his black, cold veins. Andsomething, she will admit, ain’t nothing.





	Letters from the Underground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).

> I saw your prompts for Hades & Eurydice and had to give this a try! Hope you enjoy it. :)

“You can go now,” Boss says, man Eurydice’s known by a good handful of names: King of Diamonds, King of Spades; Mr. Hades; Hades, Lord of the Underworld. Boss these days, just Boss, plain and simple, so she can near about forget he was the main hand in taking everything from her—everything Eurydice had, which was precious little and yet so much, too much by the end.

Now, Boss ain’t much of a tender soul, ain’t precisely kind—gotta blame his sunshine wife, Eurydice thinks, for any scrap of tender-kindness scrounged up in this place—but for all that he ain’t precisely unkind, either. Plucked her from the wall crew (_ Need a secretary, _ sure he did, he who’s managed centuries without one) out of the goodness of his heart, if he has a heart, which Eurydice for one can’t see as being the case. Still. Boss has got _ something _ pumping the black, cold blood through his black, cold veins. And _ something _, she will admit, ain’t nothing. 

“Papers all filed?” she asks, then, ‘cause of that something and ‘cause Boss is her boss, not ‘cause she’s lonely and alone, the way to the barracks dim and cold. No, not at all. “You want me to take that stack down to the archives?”

Boss raises his head, thick eyebrows beetling up. “Go,” he orders, his voice grating like he’s swallowed a mouthful of slag. Used to make Eurydice tremble in her bones, that voice. Not so much anymore. “It’s late,” Boss says, though there ain’t any clocks keeping time in Hadestown, no sun or moon or stars besides. The cycle of the seasons does well enough for him. Gotta do well enough for them all. “Go on home.”

It ain’t home. Eurydice considers saying so, saying she ain’t tired since she ain’t; stopped feeling most of those urges a while ago. Urge to eat, urge to sleep—what’s the use in closing your eyes when they open in the same gray, day after day? She does nap at her desk on occasion, the schoolgirl-sized tiny thing crammed into one corner of Boss’s cavernous office, and when she does Boss don’t say a word. But that there ain’t mercy so much as guilt, and as Eurydice knows guilt can turn on a dime, especially where gods are concerned, she gets up, stretches, collects her coat, and heads for the door. Tosses one last look over her shoulder before she goes.

Head bent back to the marbled slab of his desktop, Boss has his good fountain pen in hand, his good, creamy-white paper before him. Blotter’s within grabbing distance too. He goes to mark the sheet across the top, then stops. Hesitates, you’d say, if Boss were the kind of man for hesitating. He stops, the pen bobs, and a drop of ink splatters onto the clean page, ruining it.

“You’re still working on the letter?” Eurydice blurts. Can’t help herself. 

His head rises again. She braces for a stony glare, but there ain’t one to be found. Boss looks at Eurydice, don’t even stare, just looks, his great old face hard and blank, desolate. Desolate, somehow, like there’s things he won’t ever tell her but aches to unload off his chest even so. He nods.

“Well.” Faltering. Almost ashamed, though she’s got no cause to be. “Good night.” And where did that come from? Eurydice’s got no cause to wish him a good night. Boss never sleeps, anyway. 

If she’s surprised him, he don’t show it. “Good night,” he says, reaching for a fresh sheet. His pen scritching over the paper, Boss adds, “Mind the door on your way out.”

* * *

The way back to the barracks wherein Eurydice, lucky gal, gets a room to herself, nice and neat as you please, fitted with another schoolgirl-sized desk and everything, is dim and cold. It’s also long, though she makes it longer than it has to be, shuffling under the flickering electric streetlamps, thinking. Thinks a lot, does Eurydice. Just not about herself, if she can manage it. No good comes of that these days.

As she passes under it one the streetlamps flickers faster, then pops out. _ The grid’s overloaded, _ Boss has said, _ I’m asking too much of it, _ like the grid’s a living, breathing thing in need of coaxing, though maybe, surrounded by the hum and sizzle of the electric, the brighter-than-day glower of it in the factories, Eurydice’s come ‘round some to his way of thinking. Maybe she sees why he overloads it anyhow, trapped as he is down here in the cold, in the dank and the dark. Pinned to the year’s slow cycle, waiting—always waiting. 

Some soul or other, like as not late for his shift, plows oncoming into Eurydice’s path. She sidesteps without a word, moves on. 

Forever and always: Boss has been working on the letter a good four months. Must be at least that, by Eurydice’s figuring—ain’t autumn yet, but autumn’s dragging itself closer. Too close for a man who ain’t yet written his wife, who’s started letter after letter (even had Eurydice copy out a fair few, the cool, businesslike ones it’s a pure mercy didn’t travel no farther than her desk) without bringing himself to send one. Autumn’s coming. It’ll come cold, full winter in half the time. Bad luck for anyone on the road, anyone picking their way north on songs alone—

No. Not now. Not _ him. _

—Keep thinking on Boss, Boss with his desolation and his nodding, his pen fumbling in fingers that come solid-steady to any other task; think on his sunshine wife, the only woman as can drive him to such a state. Persephone of a handful of names like her husband: Our Lady of this or that. Lady who snuck Eurydice a kiss upside the head and a nip of sunlight straight from the bottle before she went upstairs, said, _ Send word, _ her lovely face agleam, awaiting the fresh air Eurydice won’t get but a whiff of ever again. _ If the old man don’t treat you right send word, you hear? _

And what if the old man ain’t treating himself right? Always working, ain’t sleeping so much as a wink...his face, Eurydice’s still stuck on his face and that little nod when it ain’t none of her concern, not after what he’s done to her. She’s stewing in some faltering-shameful mess when Boss should stew in his own black blood. Seems he’s happy to, anyway. Why shouldn’t he shoulder for six months what she’ll carry for the rest of her days? 

But—

But Eurydice tramps the dim, cold way to her bed thinking on Boss; Boss, his wife, and his unsent letter. Ain’t as though she can think on _ him _ instead. Ain’t as though she can think on herself.

* * *

She drank corn liquor strong enough to strip paint the day he picked her out of the wall crew. Good news, wasn’t it, and weren’t the others glad for her in their own gray-eyed, blank-eyed ways, and shouldn’t Eurydice celebrate, never mind she couldn’t stand the man’s face or his voice, never mind he’d pulled the earth out from under her and now she’d have to see to him every day, _ yessir _ and _ nossir, _ cozy up inside his office. File contracts same as the sort she’d signed away her soul on. Watch other souls pass through to sign themselves away, her lips seamed tight.

Ain’t much a life, that. Hardly worth living, a life like that. So. Eurydice drank corn liquor strong enough to strip paint.

She drank a good bit, then stumbled her way through the streets in the late hours of the graveyard shift, every shift being a graveyard shift down in Hadestown. She sang and shouted ‘till she was hoarse, sunk in sick misery, gut roiling, and one way or another, somehow or other, he found her.

Has a way about him, way of finding her when she’s at her lowest, swooping in like a vulture. “What, you ain’t gonna ask me to sing?” Eurydice remembers spitting while she glared up at his huge dark bulk, vast beyond measure to her always. Mountainous.

“No.” The word gritted, scraped through her head. The word hurt. “Seems as though you’ve run raw already, songbird.”

Rasp and dross and nothing else. “You ain’t nothing,” Eurydice heard herself—must’ve been dead drunk, angry as sin. “Big man up in the office, you ain’t shit—” her head spun “—your own woman don’t want you no more, that why you’re doing this? You’re still punishing me ‘cause she don’t want you? ‘Cause you brought me down when she didn’t want you?” And Eurydice started to cry. She don’t remember sobbing, don’t remember her shoulders or her belly heaving, but she remembers teary slop and snot slicking her cheeks. “Why’d I follow you, huh? Why’d I ever listen to you?”

Same as she don’t remember sobbing, she don’t remember the look on his face, if it had a particular look. But there must’ve been _ something _ there after she twisted the knife, something in those gimlet eyes behind the glasses, and Eurydice can just about imagine those eyes going steely-dark and bottomless. It couldn’t’ve been more than a week since his wife left, taking light and fresh air with her, those and, Eurydice thinks, the single sorry scrap of tenderness Mr. Hades has ever called his own. 

He said, “You’ll have an early start tomorrow. Come here,” voice not kind, nor yet unkind, voice a slab of marble, unyielding.

Eurydice shook her head. “No.” Lord, if only Orpheus’d been so unyielding—not _ him _, no, put him out, out of your mind. “You’ve done plenty,” she said. “Plenty enough. Leave me alone.”

“Come here.” Black veins in the marble now. It was a chance he’d not offer one soul in a hundred; who was she to squander it? Eurydice didn’t know, still don’t. What’s left of the night ain’t much more than a gin-sticky smear. Gin. She don’t much care for gin. Truth be told, Eurydice don’t much care for corn liquor, either. 

Stumbling backwards. Faltering. “No—”

A smear, like she said. Eurydice might recall spewing a good amount of corn liquor over his immaculate leather shoes, might recall a heavy arm bolstering her upright, the heft of him close enough that she caught a coal-sharp trace of his cologne. Might recall a sight more, and then again she might not. All as comes through for certain is this: Eurydice woke the morning after to the first shift whistle, in her new room in the barracks, shoes off and face wiped clean, swathed in a heavy black coat. She shrugged off the coat, she dragged herself up, and she took herself to work, head pounding full of cotton. 

No state to start a new job in, but she and Boss ain’t discussed it since.

* * *

Rows of bunks in the barracks, rows upon rows, then rooms, of which there ain’t many, towards the back. Eurydice picks her way past sleeping gray figures, soft as she can, gets to her place, through her door, shuts it behind her. 

She flicks the lamp on. Eurydice shucks off her coat and then her boots and drops to her hard, springy cot. She rolls onto her side, eyeing the pitiful little desk tucked into one corner. Eurydice eyes that desk like a hen eyeing a fox in the coop. She rolls over, shuts her eyes. But she ain’t feeling any urge to sleep. The complete opposite, actually. 

_ Send word. _ The Lady in her head again, so lovely, fresh as you please, open to the world and the whole spread of what lies atop it, so much...well, so much like _ him, _ if sharper and older and stronger, strong as the earth itself, that is it any wonder Boss misses her like he’d miss a piece of his own heart, the heart he don’t have, like Eurydice misses—

“Shit,” she mutters. She turns back over and sits up. Eurydice stares at the desk. “You ain’t _ shit,” _ she snaps, bitterly angry for the first time tonight, and Eurydice gets up. Eurydice goes to her desk. 

She sits herself down. Boss’ll still be working up in the office. Could be he’s let his expression fall into whatever cracked lines of longing have eroded their way through over the years. Could very well be, seeing as what he was willing to show her in the moment.

They’ll drink their coffee tomorrow. They always do—one mug black as tar on her desk, one mug on his. They might strike up a conversation in between filing records and balancing the books; Boss is a good listener when he’s of a mind to listen.

Boss is good company. 

Good company, and...hell, he’s good enough company to make the gray endless days worth repeating, and Eurydice hates to see him like this, no matter what he deserves. She pulls a cheap penny notebook out of her desk drawer. There’s pencils squirreled away in there, too. After lining them up Eurydice opens the notebook to a fresh page.

Since moving on from the wall crew she’s had a good haul of practice in writing. Writing Boss’s wife, whom she’s at least met before, can’t be much harder than writing Boss’s clients, old gods from up the mountain whom Eurydice’s never clapped eyes on and never wishes to. More personal, though. Across the top of her page she writes in a clear, careful hand_ To Persephone, Our Lady of the Underground and the Up Top, _then stops. Hesitates. Eurydice chews at her pencil a minute before folding over the page, starting a new one. 

_ I’m writing on behalf of your husband, _ she tells his sunshine wife, _ ‘cause he’s a man gone stiff in some joints, if you take my meaning, and I think you do. I’m writing to say— _Might recall a sight more of that gin-sticky, screaming night, Eurydice just might. Might be she does remember sobbing, bent double with the heave of it, the raspy weight of her grief. Hades steadied her, got her upright, and the smell of his cologne was giving her a headache besides the one already provided by the booze; Eurydice didn’t care what she said, who heard her. 

“It hurts.” She sobbed like a baby, heart squeezed like a fist in her chest; the drink was bringing _ him _ on too strong, bright eyes, dancing fingers, voice stumbling sometimes when he talked but never when he sang. “I can’t drop it,” Eurydice said. “I gotta hold it, it lies there and I hold it and it _ hurts.” _

And Hades was looking at her. Hades was looking down at her, vulture eyes behind his dark glasses, and Eurydice remembers he’d hauled her up and there she was right then, huddled like a chick under his wing. Dark and deep, his voice, veins in marble. “Hurts like the very fires of the pit,” Hades said. “I know, songbird. I know.”

Eurydice had no answer for him when, using his one hand still to steady her, he dipped the other into his breast pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. No answer when Hades handed the handkerchief over and she mopped it across her face, but she wonders now if, earlier when she’d needled him about his wife, she wonders if the look on his face weren’t closer to the bleak emptiness of tonight. She thinks it must’ve been—back then she didn’t think. Eurydice whimpered next to him, the man who’d banished Orpheus to the farthest corner of the earth and her beneath the earth, the two of them cast out together, lost together. Hades, who’d taken everything from her, as alone as she was.

Didn’t occur to her ‘till the damp handkerchief was crumpled in her fist that maybe he wasn’t doling out a punishment so much as trying to even the score, which couldn’t and can’t be done. He must’ve known that. Yet.

Eurydice writes: _ —to say...well. He’s trying. I think you know that, too. Trying as hard as he knows. Meantime— _ She squeezes her pencil, fingertips pinching white. No remaking the past, is there, only the future to live with now. And the loneliness of loving someone who can’t be reached...come down to it, she ain’t about to wish that on anybody. Anybody at all. _ I hope you’ll also take my meaning when I say that a long winter calls for a long summer in turn, but not overlong. There’s things as need time to rest and grow down here: little bit of kindness, maybe. Some tenderness. _

_ Good night, _ Eurydice thinks, and remembers, and it’s awful late; she’d do well to wrap this up. She bites the end of her pencil one last time, thinking the Lady might take this to heart, and then again she might not. Gods are changeable, turning on a dime. 

Changeable. Ain’t that the dream, the hope beyond hoping. _ There’s things as _ can _ grow in the dark, _ Eurydice finally scribbles. Eyes are getting heavy. Once this is done she might try to sleep. _ I believe that. Don’t I just pray you believe it too. _


End file.
